Routledge is proud to be re-issuing this landmark series in association with the International African Institute. The series, published between 1950 and 1977, brings together a wealth of previously un-co-ordinated material on the ethnic groupings and social conditions of African peoples. Concise, critical and (for its time) accurate, the Ethnographic Survey contains sections as follows: Physical Environment Linguistic Data Demography History & Traditions of Origin Nomenclature Grouping Cultural Features: Religion, Witchcraft, Birth, Initiation, Burial Social & Political Organization: Kinship, Marriage, Inheritance, Slavery, Land Tenure, Warfare & Justice Economy & Trade Domestic Architecture Each of the 50 volumes will be available to buy individually, and these are organized into regional sub-groups: East Central Africa, North-Eastern Africa, Southern Africa, West Central Africa, Western Africa, and Central Africa Belgian Congo. The volumes are supplemented with maps, available to view on routledge.com or available as a pdf from the publishers.

While most studies of the slave trade focus on the volume of captives and on their ethnic origins, the question of how the Africans organized their familial and communal lives to resist and assail it has not received adequate attention. But our picture of the slave trade is incomplete without an examination of the ways in which men and women responded to the threat and reality of enslavement and deportation. Fighting the Slave Trade is the first book to explore in a systematic manner the strategies Africans used to protect and defend themselves and their communities from the onslaught of the Atlantic slave trade and how they assaulted it. It challenges widely held myths of African passivity and general complicity in the trade and shows that resistance to enslavement and to involvement in the slave trade was much more pervasive than has been acknowledged by the orthodox interpretation of historical literature. Focused on West Africa, the essays collected here examine in detail the defensive, protective, and offensive strategies of individuals, families, communities, and states. In chapters discussing the manipulation of the environment, resettlement, the redemption of captives, the transformation of social relations, political centralization, marronage, violent assaults on ships and entrepôts, shipboard revolts, and controlled participation in the slave trade as a way to procure the means to attack it, Fighting the Slave Trade presents a much more complete picture of the West African slave trade than has previously been available.

"West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army, 1860-1960 explores the history of Britain's West African colonial army based in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and the Gambia placing it within a broader social context and emphasizing, as far as possible, the experience of the ordinary soldier. The aim is not to describe the many battles and campaigns fought by this force but to look at the development of the West African colonial army as an institution over the course of about a century. In pursuing this goal, it is sometimes useful to employ the lens of military culture defined differently by scholars but essentially meaning a set of shared ideas and behaviors that inform daily life in the military. While other locally recruited colonial militaries in Africa have attracted considerable attention from historians as they served as an essential pillar supporting European rule, this book represents the first comprehensive scholarly study of Britain's West African army which was the largest such British-led force south of the Sahara. The study is based on extensive archival research conducted in nine archives located in five countries"--

In 1999 (August 30 September 2) the Pan African Anthropological Association (PAAA) marked the 10th anniversary of its creation by holding its 9th Annual Conference in Yaounde, Cameroon the city and country of its birth. The conference, themed The Anthropology of Africa: Challenges for the 21st Century, was attended by some seventy participants, mostly African. Among the international participants was Dr Sydel Silverman, President of the Wenner Gren Foundation at the time a long term partner of the PAAA; she was present at the inaugural conference in 1988. The conference proceedings were initially published in 2000 with very limited circulation. Given the continued relevance of the papers presented, and in view of the call by the President of the PAAA for African anthropologists to reunite anthropological theory and practice in the teaching programmes of African universities, the PAAA is pleased to republish the proceedings of its landmark 9th Annual Conference. The book consists of forty three chapters divided into eight parts, namely: i) teaching anthropology in the decades ahead; ii) Health Challenges: HIV/AIDS Anthropological Perspectives; iii) NGOS: Use and Misuse of Anthropology; iv) Anthropological Focus on Environment; v) Some Applied Issues in Anthropology; vi) The African Family in Crisis; vii) Ethnicity and Ethnic Conflicts; and viii) Population issues and anthropology: Fertility Crisis. Paul Nkwi concludes his introduction to the volume with these words: The Anthropology of Africa will remain for a long time, fundamentally applied if it is to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.

The collective inquiries in this volume address ethnicity in ancient Africa as social fact and political artifact along numerous dimensions. Is ethnicity a useful analytic? What can archaeology say about the kinds of deeper time questions which scholars have asked of identities in Africa? Eleven authors engage with contemporary anthropological, historical and archaeological perspectives to examine how ideas of self-understanding, belonging, and difference in Africa were made and unmade. They examine how these intersect with other salient domains of social experience: states, landscapes, discourses, memory, technology, politics, and power. The various chapters cover broad geographic and temporal ground, following an arc across Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and East Africa, spanning from prehistory to the colonial period.